the geist of the zeit

The nerds have taken over Hollywood, America and the world. It wasn’t just superheroes either. Zombies, androids, vampires, wizards, aliens, werewolves, intergalactic sagas, Lego, H.P. Lovecraft, Tolkien, board games based on TV shows – though these things were never unpopular per se, they always belonged to children, or to people at the lonelier fringes of the culture. Now they are the culture.

It’s true that a lot of pop culture seems perpetually juvenile. It’s also true that a phase of extended adolescence seems to be the new normal — not just in the case of entertainment choices, but also concerning the delayed onset of careers and families, the traditional markers of settled adulthood. How much of this is a sign of cultural enfeeblement and decadence? Alternatively, how much of it is attributable to the new “problem of abundance” created by technology, which allows individuals an increasing plethora of options with which to customize their lives, even as it disrupts the stability of many career options? In other words, is the end nigh, or is this all just the latest sound and fury in the open-ended evolution of a species with no inherent telos? There are many interesting angles that could be explored regarding this topic. Unfortunately, since we inhabit a deeply-stupid media ecosystem, all slippery slopes must lead to you-know-who:

If many people in a society feel like outsiders and the major mass culture tells them loudly and constantly that this is a noble thing to be, then what kind of politics will you have? There are battalions of pollsters, number-crunchers and political scientists who could explain what happened in 2016 – but a Trump presidency became possible first with the popularity of characters like Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne.

If the Venn diagram overlap between Comic-Con attendees and MAGA-hat wearers didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. It’s like a more mainstream version of intersectionality — all bad things are interconnected. The popcorn entertainment I disapprove of is basically the same thing as the worst political trends in the world. It’s convenient how that’s always the case. Ironically, just a few paragraphs earlier, he claimed that Marvel movies “reflect Americans [sic] paranoia right back at them to pack out theaters.” Apparently they also serve as a foundation to allow critics to make specious, not to say paranoid, connections in order to pack out a word count.

But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.

Oh, no. Surely not. No, please don’t…!

Our current era is marked by cynicism and nihilism—it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that we managed to elect the worst person in the world as president, a con artist and pathological liar who will say anything to stay in the public consciousness and keep the inverted pyramid of his shabby criminal empire from toppling down onto his empty head. Trump is an avatar of everything impermanent, incompetent, and insincere about this era, and I believe there’s a great inchoate hunger for the opposite, for someone who thinks that words and ideas matter.

Sigh. He did it. Yes, of course, if a literary style guide becomes a surprise bestseller, it must have something to do with Donald Trump, the star at the center of the bien-pensant solar system. A moment’s reflection would remind us that Steven Pinker, to name one example, also wrote a bestselling style guide in 2014, suggesting that there may just be a sizable audience with a perennial interest in the craft of writing regardless of political trends, an audience that, shockingly, might not spend every conscious moment obsessing over Donald Trump. Frankly, this kind of “praise” is a philistine insult. It reduces a thoughtful consideration of language and writing to just another emoticon in the frivolous chatter of the news cycle. A book on stylish writing, grown women wearing ridiculous pussy hats — they’re just interchangeable symbols of self-indulgent #resistance. I’m afraid the barbarians are already inside the gates of the literary imagination.

While reading this article about the trendy socialism among New York City’s “creative underclass,” I had a strange feeling of déjà vu. Then I realized it wasn’t that I’d read the article before; it was that Eric Hoffer had already summed it up much more succinctly in his book The Ordeal of Change: “Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status.”

While the motivations of the movement for more diverse voices in young adult fiction is commendable—YA fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has its fair share of access problems with regard to class and race—the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre, one in which authors, editors, agents, and adult readers and reviewers outnumber youthful readers, has become a cesspool of toxicity.

“Young-adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Vulture’s Kat Rosenfield wrote in the definitive must-read piece on this strange and angry internet community. The call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons almost always involve claims that books are insensitive with regard to their treatment of some marginalized group, and the specific charges, as Rosenfield showed convincingly, often don’t seem to warrant the blowups they spark—when they make any sense at all.

It often seems like the web consists of nothing but dispiriting stories like this. You could set your watch by the tumbrils as they trundle past each day, carrying a new batch of thought-criminals to the guillotine. On the bright side, though, it’s been years since I’ve seen one of those insipid articles claiming that reading literature makes one a better person and contributes to moral progress. (Speaking of fiction, it would be nice if critics like Singal could stop pretending that the motivations are “commendable” and somehow unrelated to their utterly predictable manifestations, but I suppose that’s just my undying optimism shining through.)

That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.

Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.

We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.

Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.

Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.

Subtlety under political correctness is out. So, too, complexity of character. To be politically correct one must also firmly believe that people do not change: If they were the least racist, sexist, homophobic forty years ago, they must still be so now.

Eh, I don’t think that’s true. The same double-standards of tribal solidarity apply here, as always. The rhetorical jazz hands of justification aside, Sarah Jeong and Joy Reid’s social media histories, for example, didn’t ruin them because they’re both members of the right tribe. They were allowed to “learn” and “grow” when someone less well-connected or less useful to other people’s ambitions (Razib Khan, Kevin Williamson) would have been abandoned. “Belief” can be as flexible as a yogi in service to political maneuvering. What’s more interesting, in my view, is to wonder why so many people go along with this charade. We all know better. We’ve all made off-color jokes and entertained scandalous thoughts. Not one of us would survive the Intersectional Inquisition with our reputations intact, even, or especially, those who are most loudly and fervently denouncing others. So why do we pretend that a decades-old photo or a disowned remark say anything significant about a person’s character? Laziness? Cowardice? Both?

Like quite a few people in this area, my next-door neighbor has a Confederate flag flying underneath his American one. That alone would be enough to make him persona non grata in the eyes of most bien-pensants, should he ever rise to their attention. But he and his family are good people. He’s given us much free advice and free labor when we’ve needed it. After every major snowstorm here, he gets on his small tractor first thing in the morning and goes up and down the road, clearing people’s driveways for them. When we had the severe ice storm in November, he and his son were awake for more than 24 hours straight, helping to chainsaw and remove all the downed trees in the area. Years ago, when a corner of the embankment by our bridge washed out, he had one of his crew come over with a backhoe and spend several hours digging out the creekbed and filling in the collapsed area (refusing to even allow us to reimburse him for the gas). When we offered to pay, or even feed, the guy doing the work, he told us no. Our neighbor, he said, had been the man willing to give him a job when he was fresh out of jail for drug possession, so as far as he was concerned, he was just paying that kindness forward.

I don’t know why he flies the Confederate flag. I don’t know if it’s just a generic expression of affection for rural Virginia or something more sinister. If I wanted to know, I’d have to ask him, but of course, I really don’t care. I know enough about him to have a sense of his character without having to rely on superficial clues. Again, we all know people like this, and we all know better than to entertain snap judgments and assume the worst. The most corrosive thing about this trend of replacing the personal with the political is that it destroys precisely that sort of nuance which allows people to forgive and trust each other without expecting perfection. In our laziness and cowardice, we willfully forget that most people are too complex to be reduced to a snapshot or a soundbite, even though our complicity won’t protect us when it’s our turn.

“Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is forever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover.

You know the left has really changed in this country when you find its denizens glorifying America’s role in the Vietnam War and lionizing the social attitudes of the corporate monolith Procter & Gamble.

The Lady of the House was telling me about a conversation between two Facebook friends over the recent Gillette “toxic masculinity” ad. One person griped about it, and the other responded by saying, “Well, I think it’s great that the message is getting out there!” The message? Who looks to corporate ad agencies for moral instruction? What kind of frivolous egotist is so easily flattered by a barely-concealed sales pitch? And these true believers volunteer to proselytize for the product! It struck me that however irreligious these people consider themselves, their appetite for sermons and missionary work is insatiable. If priests and ministers would adorn their vestments with corporate logos à la NASCAR drivers, they could probably get people to start attending church again.

He goes on in his next essay to attack “professional victims, those who make a nice living off their victimhood”, by which he implies everyone who is not also a privileged white man. He writes off both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, saying that their support comes in large part from guilty voters, not from political acumen on their part. He characterizes Toni Morrison as “a connoisseur of victimhood”. And so on and so forth. He recycles and churns out a succinct array of half-baked bigotries in essays such as these, which will no doubt be picked up within a few years by men’s rights activists and neo-nazis and other distasteful reactionaries. One can’t help but wonder what Epstein feels at churning out fuel for those reactionaries most determined to wreck “the best that has been thought and said” in liberal culture.

Joseph Epstein, guilty of giving aid and comfort to neo-Nazis. And here I thought there were no new smears under the intersectional sun.

The tone of Andy Richter and Judd Apatow’s tweets was not that they were disappointed that C.K. had done a bit that wasn’t funny at a show neither of them had attended. No, Richter and Apatow are outraged. And outrage is a double-edged sword, isn’t it? Comics don’t want to admit they’re outraged. Because outrage traditionally makes you a butt of jokes, a bit like the teenaged pearl-clutching brigade C.K. mocked.

What is driving this episode of cultural citizens’ arrest is that the Parkland kids are untouchable. They can’t be made fun of. They are . . . icons. Comics can’t say that because labeling the Parkland kids sacred cows would acknowledge the existence of sacred cows. And they want to reserve the right to barbecue everybody else’s sacred cows.

It’s true that the woke left are the new Moral Majority, and it’s deliciously funny that, like all self-righteous prigs, they honestly don’t see it. Still, not to overanalyze a comedy bit, but I thought the premise of C.K.’s joke, that youthful rebellion should always be cumulative in one direction, the direction of thoughtless hedonism, was pretty flat. And not to lean too heavily on generational stereotypes, but doesn’t it almost seem like a caricature of self-satisfied Summer of Love attitudes to take pride in the idea of your children being even more “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” than you were at their age? How far can things go in one overindulgent direction before it gets predictable and boring?

A friend of mine has an academic career centered on video games and LARPing. Her husband is a guitarist. Her teenage son, she once confided to me, was causing her concern because he seemed to be showing, well, almost Young Republican tendencies. He was interested in the stock market and making money! She was genuinely baffled as to why he would feel the need to differ from their example. “We’re artsy and tolerant!” she actually said to me in bewilderment. How could this Alex P. Keaton have appeared in their right-thinking household like Milton Friedman springing from Jerry Garcia’s forehead? Shouldn’t the old dialectical tension between the thesis of parental authority and the antithesis of adolescent contrariness have resolved itself in the peaceful synthesis of ageless domestic utopia, enabling each individual to create subversive art in the morning, tend an organic vegetable garden in the afternoon, and share free love in the evening, in accordance with their whims? Interestingly, her older daughter superficially adopted all the trappings of hippie nostalgia to which her mom was sympathetic, from tie-dyed shirts to pot smoking, while still being quite angry and traditionally rebellious, rather than archly skeptical like her brother. Unintended consequences are so fascinating.

And unintended consequences are precisely what the censorious among us can’t tolerate. Ironically enough, many people would like comedy to keep moving cumulatively in one direction, always predictably attacking safe targets like bourgeois morality and organized religion with the same old profane weapons. They want it to remain forever 1984, reprising their role as the rebellious kids in Footloose, outfighting the rednecks and outwitting the Reverend by quoting his own holy book at him, winning the right to dance and party the night away. But taboos are comedy’s natural prey, and currently, all the meatiest taboos are grazing in progressive pastures. Good luck trying to keep nature from taking its course.

After reading yesterday’s post, the Lady of the House, who is an exotic foreigner and sometimes unfamiliar with common rites of passage in American cultural life, asked me why The Catcher in the Rye was ever banned. I’m not really sure, I responded. I assume it was somehow shocking to mid-century sensibilities. Like most people, I had to read the book in high school English class, but it didn’t impress me then and I’ve rarely thought about it since (except for that one time). But while browsing some literary blogs later on, my eye was caught by a link to a post asking if Salinger’s novel was still relevant on the occasion of his 100th birthday. With the Lady’s question still fresh in my mind, I thought that maybe I would find something informative there.

Holden is Patient Zero for generations infected by his misanthropy. We live in a world overpopulated by privileged white guys who mistake their depression for existential wisdom, their narcissism for superior vision.

I’m not sure how this residual naïveté lingers in my soul; I can’t say why, just because I was visiting the column of a Washington Post book critic, I thought I might find something more interesting than another woke sermon. More fool me, though. It’s just the usual potpourri of clichés, presented, as always, by a not-at-all overcompensating middle-aged white man hoping his fervent testimony keeps him one step ahead of the intersectional tumbrils. Caulfield represents the monochromatic past; the new hotness in young-adult literature is a book about a black French-Canadian boy who moves to Texas (whether these cosmetic traits make the book interesting or not is a question left unaddressed). Salinger’s reclusiveness suggests mental illness — the bad kind, apparently, the kind that would make you avoid social media, not the sympathetic kind that can be talked about endlessly on social media and used as the cornerstone of an entire identity. And, of course, Salinger was an abusive creeper, which we no longer tolerate in the era of #MeToo. For those obsessed with the trendy and topical, everything, even a paean to diversity, becomes an excuse to think and talk about themselves and the moment they inhabit. As Auden said, Any heaven we think it decent to enter/Must be Ptolemaic with ourselves at the center.

It’s quite funny because again, just yesterday, I learned that Holden was allegedly the harbinger of Marxism and nihilism in America, the spearhead of a leftist plot against decency and family life; today, I’m told that he’s actually the epitome of white privilege, emblematic of the bourgeois insularity that has oppressed so many for so long. How can he be both at once? Is he a rabbit or a duck? Is he a vase or two people kissing? Whatever the case, at least we can all agree that he’s to blame. If only his name had been Wayne.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.